


The Lovers of Traitors

by TheHufflebean (SevralShips)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Cigarettes, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Self-Hatred, honestly just a couple pages worth of Remus hating himself and brooding, kind of a vent fic about my recent breakup tmi, self-loathing af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-09 22:15:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20124709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevralShips/pseuds/TheHufflebean
Summary: 'It wasn’t the lovers of traitors who wrote the textbooks, on account of bias and whatnot. Remus pitied Guy Fawkes’ beau, whoever they might have been, and Brutus’ and Benedict Arnold’s. It was a terrible thing, to hate someone as a public enemy but to know how they took their tea, for your memory to be the sole record of the way their eyes got when they were frightened but wouldn’t admit it, for your body to carry the knowledge of just what combination of fingers and tongue and tone of voice would make them cum like religious epiphany. Another pull of the foul cigarette, bitter and sour and acrid, better at least than the taste of Sirius on his tongue, syrup-sweet and lethal as antifreeze.'Just a short little vent piece, Remus brooding about Sirius a few months after he is sent to Azkaban.





	The Lovers of Traitors

The worst part, perhaps, was the selfish relief that he was not the one in Azkaban, and the sickle-slice of guilt that followed it.

Remus would try to staunch the guilt with reason, facts like gauze, like tourniquets against the arterial pour of it. _I’m not the one in Azkaban because I’m innocent_, he would remind himself, but that certainly didn’t feel true. 

What the fuck was innocence anyway? Could you be innocent truly when you shared your skin with an insensible bloodlust? Could you be innocent when you’d kept so many secrets from your friends that by the time of their tragic deaths they’d become near strangers? Could you be innocent when your body and your heart had been home to a traitor?

No, innocent was no word for what Remus was. Blind, yes. Selfish, certainly. Complicit. Worse than all the rest, complicit.

The first few days had been a blur of choking tears, gulping down liquor in an effort to drown only to vomit it back up before it could even do any good by entering his bloodstream and anesthetizing him a little bit. At some point he’d passed out and he’d woken in his own sick, cuts on his hands from records he didn’t remember breaking. He didn’t repair them or vanish the pieces, he didn’t pack a bag. He’d just left the flat where he’d harbored a villain and he’d left England and he’d tried to leave the rest of it, but it came along with him.

He looked out from the little stoop of the little trailer that was temporary residence and thus couldn’t be called home, out at the brown flats of the American west. It was as different as land could be from the Welsh glen of his childhood, from the damp green and grey grandeur of Hogwarts, from the cramped Dickensian romance of the flat in London. Another world entirely from the dismal prison in the North Sea that he was supposed not to be thinking about. 

It had been a couple months, or maybe more than a couple and before he could stop himself, he wondered if Sirius had gone mad yet. They said it didn’t take long, and after all, he’d been half-mad already, hadn’t he? At age eleven on the Hogwarts Express, there’d been a wild glint to his eyes already that Remus had stupidly not seen for a warning. Surely, by now he was a ravening lunatic and maybe that made him the lucky one, that he didn't have to live with it. A broken mind at least would be free of the whole unwieldy mess of it, the questions without answers, the red herrings and false positives, the despite-himself longing, all the knowledge accrued from a decade of studying Sirius, useless now except for self-flagellation.

Remus took a long deep drag from his fag. He still wasn’t quite used to the taste of this American brand, the cheapest available in the sorry gas station Apparating distance from the trailer. He could so clearly imagine Sirius beside him on the wooden step up to the trailer’s door, his beauty devastating in the yellow prairie sun even as he scowled at the sourness of cheap tobacco. He’d have to squint against the light, his pale eyes sensitive hence the obnoxiously sexy sunglasses he'd favored when he didn't forget them at home. That sort of thing never made it into textbooks, strangely enough, and that had made it easier once for Remus to think of traitors not as ordinary people. Until the obvious had rubbed it in his face. It was odd, though, that no one remembered Guy Fawkes’ allergies or how well he could whistle or that he was a stallion in the sack, and just so, no one would remember that Sirius Black had light-sensitive eyes or that he delighted in singing the middle portion of Blondie’s _Sunday Girl_ in impeccable french or that, if Fawkes was a stallion, surely Sirius had to have been a hippogriff or a dragon or something. 

It wasn’t the lovers of traitors who wrote the textbooks, on account of bias and whatnot. Remus pitied Guy Fawkes’ beau, whoever they might have been, and Brutus’ and Benedict Arnold’s. It was a terrible thing, to hate someone as a public enemy but to know how they took their tea, for your memory to be the sole record of the way their eyes got when they were frightened but wouldn’t admit it, for your body to carry the knowledge of just what combination of fingers and tongue and tone of voice would make them cum like religious epiphany. Another pull off the foul cigarette, bitter and sour and acrid, better at least than the taste of Sirius on his tongue, syrup-sweet and lethal as antifreeze.

Perhaps it was time to relocate. Remus hadn’t run this far just to be followed by Sirius, the spectre of him gorgeous and inscrutable and loathsome. Remus sucked in a deep breath of the dusty air, tried to be grateful that it was not icy with Dementors. But how could he be grateful for anything when he was empty? Dumbledore had owled him once since the day when he’d dropped the cruel news on him like a cartoon anvil and in it he’d urged him to _live_. To make the most of his freedom and not let the war define him. He’d reminded him that he was young. Remus had laughed bitterly and burned it, spread the ash like human remains over a lake in Oregon that had reminded him too much of the Black Lake. How was he young, or alive, or free, or lucky? He was none of those things, surely. 

On the thirtieth day of October, Sirius had taken him to bed and they had fucked. Fucking had been like fighting, like exorcism, for months. But that night it had been like Veritaserum. For the first time in so long, it had seemed like they knew each other. After, Sirius had cried and Remus had generously not drawn attention to it. As sleep had closed in on them slow, like the shutter of a camera taking a long exposure photograph, Remus had heard himself say into the damp warmth of Sirius’ neck, “I miss you.” Sirius had rasped in a gasp and echoed the same, said something mumbled and hard to hear about ‘the truth’. Remus had thought to himself that maybe they’d finally talk it all out in the morning, and to hell with Dumbledore and the Order, he’d tell Sirius everything, and maybe Sirius would tell him everything, too. But when he’d woken, he’d been alone, Sirius’ side of the bed cold.

He wanted to forget it, had thought about drawing the memory of it out with his wand and instead of depositing it in a Pensieve just throwing it as far as he could into the sea, perhaps digging a grave and throwing it in there and smothering it with soil. He imagined the cauterized absence of it in his memory and how maybe without it, he could hate Sirius and he could take Dumbledore’s platitudinous advice and live his life as if he was a real young person and not a sort of ghost. But he was too weak and he had believed that night that things could be better, that they could heal, that they could be together. He’d believed in Sirius’ goodness and he’d very nearly believed in his own worthiness and it was all that that made him so deeply bloody complicit in Sirius’ betrayal, because he’d flayed himself wide open to Sirius’ love and his ego had somehow made him believe it.

He missed him now more than ever, and the truth of that was an ecstasy of shame.

Remus pressed the end of his cigarette to his forearm, bracing eagerly for the sharp searing burn of it, but the cherry had gone out. Ash crumbled against his skin, leaving only a smudge instead of another scar. He dropped the useless butt on the dusty ground and his empty hands felt anxious and somehow risky. He realized they were trembling, as they sometimes did around the full or when panic seized his heart and the spectre of Sirius seemed to take them in his own, to rub them and squeeze them in an attempt to ground him. It might have been Sirius at fifteen, the first night he’d worn the dogskin for the moon or it might have been Sirius at seventeen when they’d got back their NEWTs results and Remus had hesitated to open his envelope. It might have been Sirius at nineteen, outside Order headquarters after they’d just seen Benjy Fenwick be blown to bits. It might have been Sirius at twenty-one, when they’d first learned that Lily and James would have to go into hiding. Or it might have been the Sirius of his imagination, at thirty when Harry would go off to Hogwarts, or at forty going a dignified grey at the temples, or at eighty still smirking exactly the same as he always had, despite a maze of laugh lines and crow’s feet.

Remus stood, shaking his head as if to shoo it all away. The sweetness of it all was unspeakably bitter now, worse than the awful cigarettes. And weak as he was to think it, the bitterest part was trying to accept that none of it had ever been sweet to begin with, that all of it had been a delusion. Sirius tutted at that, the way he would in the bleaker moments when Remus would declare that he was a monster and Sirius would declare that he was only feeling sorry for himself. Remus staggered inside and grabbed the bag that he never unpacked that held the few things he’d acquired over the last months of drifting and trying to outrun the memory of Sirius. Shame it had caught up with him again, he’d only just begun to appreciate the understated drama of the land here, the stubborn grasses and the long straight roads with their Muggle powerlines. Maybe that was the problem, once he started to feel at home at all, Sirius followed.

He squeezed his eyes shut and Apparated, trying oxymoronically to picture an unfamiliar place. Maybe, if he was lucky, this time he’d Splinch himself and that would be the merciful, cowardly end of it.

His next breath smelled like pine and he opened his eyes to a place he’d never seen, staggeringly, heart-breakingly, thankfully alone. For now.


End file.
